


Errantry, Bath, and Beyond

by redfive86



Category: Young Wizards - Diane Duane
Genre: Accidental public nudity, Angry cleaning robots, Gen, M/M, Meet-Cute, Ordeal, Swearing, Towels, Yuletide, Yuletide 2018
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-18
Updated: 2018-12-18
Packaged: 2019-09-21 08:42:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,457
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17040506
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redfive86/pseuds/redfive86
Summary: Long before he popped out to help Nita on the beach, Carl started to wonder if his wizardry really specialized in time and dimensionality (reasonable) or just in improvization when he found himself on errantry in nothing but a towel (unreasonable, should be taken up with the Powers).





	Errantry, Bath, and Beyond

**Author's Note:**

  * For [magelette](https://archiveofourown.org/users/magelette/gifts).



Carl hummed a happy tune while he reached for the shampoo bottle.  He couldn’t believe his luck. That stupid oath in the book had turned out to be true, he was suddenly friends with the cool guy from the first floor apartment due to a shared secret, and he was looking at a lifetime full of adventures.  Everything was looking up!

Except for the soap. The bar of soap was looking weak.  Carl reached into his otherspace pocket- the first trick he’d learned from his new friend- and fished around until he found his emergency bar of soap.  It had been one of the first things he’d tossed in there, right after a roll of duct tape. He figured it would come in handy if he ever got stuck somewhere.  He lathered up, rinsed off, and pulled the towel off of the showerhead.

As he toweled off his hair, Carl stepped out of the shower.  He stopped for a second to look at the mat on the bathroom floor.  Had that mat been there before his shower? Carl tucked dropped his towel on the counter and looked around the bathroom.  It looked like the bathroom he was used to, but the light fixture above the sink had changed. And the pile of his mom’s hair curlers and dryers wasn’t there.  And the three missing tiles next to the door had been replaced.

Carl stepped over to the window (the curtains had changed) and stood up on his toes to look out over the frosted window pane.  The air was smoggier than it had been when he’d woken up that morning. He peered through the heavy air, looking for the tall supports of the Brooklyn Bridge.

 _It’s really bad today,_ Carl thought. _You can’t even see the tops of the bridge!_

Carl squinted a little to get a better look. After a moment, he started to find the outline of the bridge and then froze. It wasn’t that the smog was obscuring the bridge, but the bridge _wasn’t there._ The arches were only halfway finished, there was still scaffolding all over the bridge.

_Oh, shit._

Carl turned away from the window to lean against the sink, balling his towel in his hands to give himself something to do while he thought.

_Okay, I’m in my apartment. But not my place, it’s some other time, maybe? Or universe? I’m naked in a strange place and all I have is a towel. Jesus, what do I do now? Wha-_

_Hold on, Romero. You’re a wizard. You can fix this._

_I hope._

Carl reached into his otherspace pocket and felt around until his fingers collided with the smooth edge of a hardback book. He pulled out his manual and flipped the pages under this thumb.

_Where do I even start? Is there a chapter on what to do if your shower is a time machine?_

He looked down at his manual and saw that it had fallen open to the list of wizards in the New York metropolitan area. He saw his name at the top of the second column.

ROMERO, Carl J.

115 Willow St, Apt. 4

Brooklyn, NY 10038

_On ordeal: no calls_

_Temporally distributed_

“Temporally distributed? What does that even mean? How can I be distributed when I’m all here?”

Carl paged through the index but the only entry he could find displayed a warning that the information he wanted required approval from an advisory to access. Carl huffed with impatience.

The doorknob rattled slightly and Carl’s head shot up from his manual. He grabbed his towel and his manual and leapt into the shower, pulling the curtain shut behind him. Behind the curtain, he heard someone push their shoulder against the door twice before it opened.

 _Well, it’s good to know that door has stuck since the place was built._ Carl smiled a little at the thought. His mother liked to blame Carl and his siblings for breaking the door by being to rough with it, but at least now he’d have a good defense.

Carl waited to shift from his hiding place until the man had left, watching his shoes move along the tiled floor. As soon as he was sure he was alone, Carl started skimming the index to find the closest advisory. He found a listing for an advisory in Harlem, but realized that he had no idea how to get to Harlem without the subway. A few pages later, Carl spotted a listing in Brooklyn, somewhere on Division. He sighed with relief and ran over his mental map of the city. Division was just on the other side of the Navy Yard, he didn’t have far to go. He just needed to blend in… Carl turned flipped back to the index, this time looking for spells that would make him invisible. He found a spell that worked like a wetsuit, and set to work tracing it out on the wall of the shower with his bar of soap. He worked slowly, double-checking every part as he went. When he was finished, he rolled up his towel and stashed it in his otherspace pocket, then slipped on the spell. It fit a bit too tight and felt like he was covered in jello, but he couldn’t find his reflection in the bathroom mirror.

Carl slid out of the building as quietly as possible, using his preferred route for sneaking out without alerting his mother to his absence. He climbed the gates at the end of the block and waited for the streets to settle down for the night so he could move without getting run over. About an hour after the sunset, Carl jumped from his perch, stretched, and took off toward the east at a steady jog. He ran through the empty, muddy streets, bouncing past the still-bustling Navy Yard and slowing only when he made it to Division, walking up the wide avenue looking carefully at the numbers on the buildings. After three blocks, he finally spotted the number he was looking for, painted on the front of a three-story stone building in the middle of the block. Carl hopped up the stairs and leaned against the door, pulling his towel out of his otherspace pocket. He wiggled out of the spell suit and let it dissolve, wrapping his towel back around his waist. Carl paused for a second to gather his thoughts, then knocked on the large wooden door.

_Here goes nothing. Here goes everything._

Carl squared his shoulders and waited for the door to open. He was going to get help, solve this puzzle, and have a blast. 

===================

Carl got his third-ever emergency consult request while he was swimming naked in a small cove on a tropical island. Still excited by the novelty of the call, he grabbed his beach towel, warbled something about an emergency to his boyfriend, and left immediately. Carl popped off the bright, sunny beach and found himself in a small wooden-looking structure. He immediately reached out to grab his towel as it dropped from his waist, disturbed by the air kicked up by his entrance. He’d followed the coordinates that had come in on the urgent message, but he hadn't stopped to check them first. Carl had absolutely no idea where he’d ended up, but he definitely didn’t want to be completely naked when he figured it out. He clutched it to cover himself while he tried to assess the situation.

“ Ha! You asked for help and the Powers sent you a Chippendales review!” croaked a voice from behind him.

“A what, Pie-chew? I never know what you mean, little one.” Carl heard a low, soothing voice reply in the speech.

Carl slowly pivoted to see who (or what) awaited him.

He was greeted with the sight of a slim woman, maybe four feet tall, with dark black shoulder-length hair. She was wearing a simple kimono and on one shoulder was perched a magnificent scarlet blue and yellow macaw.

Carl hesitated for a moment while he replaced his towel, then took a step forward.

“Dai! I’m Carl, and I’m on errantry and I greet you!”

====================

Carl was sweating profusely, his muscles shaking from the effort of holding the containment spell in place while he scanned the purple sky for the signal. Flashes of bright blue light scattered across his skin while the timeslide inside the containment unraveled and collapsed.

“Come on, guys, I can’t keep this up much longer,” he muttered to himself.

Carl was the last piece in the puzzle. He’d been summoned to Awahanu for urgent help to stop the spread of a timeslide that had been sabotaged by the Lone One. Together, the tean had managed to contain the collapsing time slide long enough to get nearly everyone off the planet, but Carl couldn’t let it loose until they signalled that the mission was complete.

His eyes scanned the purple sky for the signal while he mapped out the best route across the mesa.

Out of the corner of his eye, Carl saw the flash of orange sparks he’d been waiting for. It was go time. He slowly counted to five, then released the spell and ran as fast as he could toward the edge of the cliff, dodging around patches of spiky blue grass. Carl felt his bare feet kicking up clouds of dust while he undid the towel wrapped tightly around his waist. He tied both of the short sides of the towel around his wrists, then panted out the last word of the speech he had ready. Carl felt the power run down his arms and spread out into the towel. He slung the towel over his head as he neared the drop off, loud whoops leaving his lungs while he ran out into open air.

The ground fell away beneath him and Carl felt his stomach drop as gravity took hold of him. He fell for a few terrifying seconds before the wind caught his now parachute-sized towel and he started to glide toward the ground.

Carl let another howl lose that dissolved into a hearty laughter as the howl echoed around the canyon around him. _If you’d told me fifteen years ago that I’d find myself basically hang gliding naked on an alien planet halfway across the galaxy,_  he thought. _I_ _would have thought you needed to be locked up_. _I guess that’s another unintentional thing I can cross off my bucket list._

Carl pulled on the right side of the towel to turn to the right and line him up to land near the escape worldgate.

_Seriously, Carl, you really need to start keeping a spare set of clothes in your otherspace pocket. This whole turning up for errantry in a towel thing is getting old. Really kind of kills the credibility when you’re the emergency expert and you roll up butt-ass naked._

The ground came up faster than he was expecting and he overbalanced when he made contact with the rocky surface, tumbling head over heels and getting his ankles tangled in the towel. Carl skidded to a stop on his knees in the dark orange dirt, his ass high in the air and his face buried in the now-enormous towel.

 _Graceful, Romero_.

“You okay, man?”

Carl lifted his head from the towel to see another hominid stepping closer through the cloud of dust.

“You’re the last one we’re waiting for, let’s get you out of- _oh_. Uh, oh.” The hominid froze when it got close enough to get a good look at Carl. It wasn’t just another hominid, it was another human. He was tall and lanky and -  _oh, fuck_ - he was hot. Carl swore under his breath. Just the way he wanted to meet a hot wizard, face down in the dirt with skinned knees and alien sand in places it never needed to be.

A large flash of light came from the top of the mesa that was accompanied by a heavy shake of the ground.

“Shit. Let’s get out of here, man.” The other wizard grabbed Carl’s elbow to shift his body, then reached underneath his torso and lifted Carl above his shoulder. Carl’s nose bounced against the other man’s t-shirt while he was carried toward the worldgate.

_You’re really killing it here, Romero. Fuck._

Carl felt the familiar pull of transit as he was tossed through the worldgate, the breath flying out of him as he landed on his side a heartbeat later on the smooth white floor of the Crossings. He wiggled as best he could to get of the way and only narrowly missed the other man as he exited the worldgate a second later.

Carl rolled over onto his side, turning away from the other human. He slowly disentangled himself from the towel, pulling the knot from one of his wrists in the process, and brushed as much of the itchy dirt off of his body as he could. The towel was big enough to fashion into a rudimentary toga, so Carl started to wrap it around his shoulders with limited success. 

“You know, I’m very glad I saved your ass. It’s quite a nice one. Real shame to cover it up."

Carl spun around, surprised to find the other man still standing there.

The man chuckled and stuck out his hand. “Name’s Tom. Tom Swale. That was a hell of an escape you staged back there.”

Carl turned bright red, but took the other man’s hand. “Carl Romero. Thanks. I’ve always wanted to feel like James Bond, but it’s much more painful than I ever thought it would be.”

Both men laughed, then jumped at the angry whir of one of the passing cleaning robots.

“Want some help with that?” Tom gestured toward Carl’s pitiful toga.

“Sure.” Carl held still while Tom quickly and skillfully twisted the towel a few times. After a couple of pats, Carl suddenly felt a lot less self conscious about his appearance.

Several more cleaning robots had gathered to attack the large pile of sand that was now scattered all over the floor. “Let’s get out of here before they decide to make us help,” Tom said, gesturing toward a nearby bar. “You look like you could use a drink.”

Carl agreed and the two hurried across to the bar, grabbing a table toward the back out of the line of sight of the cleaning robots.

Tom prodded at the screen on the table. “It’s not every day that a gorgeous naked man drops out of the sky at your feet. Is this a common approach for you when you’re on errantry?”

Carl chuckled nervously. “It’s such a long story.”

“Go for it. I’ve got all the time in the world.”

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Yuletide, magelette! I had a blast dreaming up little ways to mess with Carl! Thanks for the fun prompt! I hope you enjoy!


End file.
